Pinchot is a “very distant cousin” of the late Pinchot-Meyer, a woman with deep CIA connections whose 1964 murder in broad daylight on a Washington D.C. walking path has never been solved.

Sounds like a great setup for a conspiracy theory, no? Well, at least one author has posited that, but not Pinchot.

“I’m not a conspiracy theorist,” he insisted when we met for coffee on Wednesday morning.

Pinchot, 72, is a legit Orange County guy. He has lived in Anaheim most of his life. He showed up at Starbucks wearing his scarlet and grey Mater Dei letterman’s jacket from its 1957 CIF football championship season. He was a teammate there of future Heisman winner John Huarte, whom he still sees occasionally, and he ended up marrying one of the cheerleaders, Diana Bouchard. He spent most of his career as an electrical engineer for Fluor.

If he is a whack job, I felt reasonably comfortable after establishing his bona fides that at least he’s our whack job.

Unfortunately, for my purposes, he didn’t take a completely whack-job position in his book, although the whole subject of Mary Pinchot-Meyer is surrounded by serious whackjobbery. In fact, on Friday, Pinchot will be in Santa Barbara, where a group of conspiracy-theorist authors (sample title: “What was George H. W. Bush Doing in Dealey Plaza?”) is holding a one-day conference.

Pinchot will speak briefly and sign his book. “I told my wife: ‘OK, you are going to have to humor some of these people.”

So who was Mary Pinchot-Meyer and what is her distant cousin’s theory?

If nothing else, Pinchot’s book sheds some light on a fascinating character whose name is unknown to all but the most avid Kennedyophile. Because of the familial tie, Pinchot knew vaguely of Pinchot-Meyer’s story, but didn’t really start looking into it until a couple of years ago.

He draws heavily on other books and articles – his book is admittedly devoid of original scholarly research – to establish that she was a woman, three years JFK’s junior, from a wealthy East Coast family who traveled in the same Ivy League/Seven Sisters crowd as the Kennedys.

She married a man, Cord Meyer, who would become a high-level CIA official. The Meyers socialized with the Kennedys. Mary’s sister was married to journalist Ben Bradlee, who also hung around with the Kennedys. There is photographic evidence that Mary was at social functions JFK attended – sometimes sitting next to him – as well as White House logs that show Mary being admitted after hours.

JFK’s pet name for her was “Mary Mary” – as in “Mary, Mary quite contrary,” thus the title of the book. A drunken Washington Post publisher Philip Graham purportedly revealed the affair between JFK and Mary at a publishers’ conference in early 1963, and another well-known Washington journalist with knowledge of it sold the story to the National Enquirer.

One year after JFK’s death, Mary was murdered. A man was arrested, tried and acquitted. No weapon was ever found. There was a frantic search for Mary’s diary by, among others, her brother-in-law Bradlee. He found some of her papers, but some believe there was much more and that they revealed her knowledge of CIA activity surrounding JFK’s assassination.

Last year, a psychologist named Peter Janney, who as a child was one of Mary’s son’s best friends, published a book in which he claims the CIA murdered JFK and Mary. More shockingly, though, he believes his own father, also a CIA official and friend of Cord Meyer, had a hand in it.

Our guy, Pinchot, won’t go that far. His theory – the real thrust of his book – is that Mary was the true love of JFK’s life. He bases this, among other things, on her extraordinary access to the White House – unlike his other concubines, for example, she routinely signed in under her real name – reports that JFK often discussed policy with her and that they were in the same social strata.

He believes that JFK had sought therapy to understand his philandering and that he came to realize Mary was his soulmate.

“He truly loved Mary, and after he was re-elected he planned to divorce Jackie and marry her.” Half of Pinchot’s book is a fictional version of what would have happened had both lived.

No CIA involvement? No LBJ-Hoover-Castro cabal? A little tame for the History channel, but I could see Lifetime.

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